CBS Discovers Blogs Like It's 1999

CBS has this awesome vintage report from the '90s today. It's about blogs, or as people used to say, "weblogs," and how they're gaining power and clout and whatnot. Interesting to see how new and exciting it was back in the beginning. LOL, the "blogosphere."

Hold up, the dateline says this story is from June 12, 2011. That must be...a mistake?

It's not a mistake; CBS is indeed 12 years late to this story. That's...okay. Always better to have it best than to have it first, etc. And, boy, do they report the shit out of it. Everything about blogs is revelatory to CBS's Rita Braver: Anyone can start one! Sometimes people make money off their blogs! You can blog about anything from surfing to motherhood, weddings to celebrity gossip!

The news hook for this is the Anthony Weiner saga, and how Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site was first to break the story. Mistake number one here is to conflate Breitbart with the zillions of personal bloggers on the Internet who occasionally scoop mainstream publications. Breitbart isn't some podunk blogger; he runs something of an empire with his sites Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Fuckfaces, and the other one, Big Pornography or whatever. Whatever you think of his politics or his personality, Breitbart is not some everyman with a birdwatching blog.

But beyond that, how many times are old people going to run this story? This one in the Times, about Dooce. This one in the Atlantic. Another Times piece, this one about fashion bloggers (they run that one about once a year). Here's one about "wife bloggers" or something. And so forth.

Anyway. Blogs. They're here, they've been around since the mid-'90s, get used to it.